May 12, 2018

No more crossover voters as Trump / GOP cuck on populism

If Trump only rallied the same people who voted for McCain or Romney, he would have lost the election just as badly as they did. Despite losing the popular vote, he swung enough Obama voters from blue states to win the Electoral College.

They were willing to take a risk on him since he campaigned as anything but the typical Republican -- populist rather than elitist, and isolationist more than globalist. That combination was right up the alley of Rust Belt voters who want to re-industrialize the dilapidated economy, who want to protect and enhance the social safety net, and who don't give a shit about "America's standing / leadership in the world".

The empty words of his speech yesterday on drug prices are just the latest example of abandoning the populist themes of his campaign. GOP partisans trapped in the Fox News bubble might not remember, but the moderates, Independents, and non-partisans who might tune into their competitor MSNBC got a vivid reminder last night when Chris Hayes & co. got to dunk on Trump for an entire segment.

And unlike the eye-rolling conspiracy theories that begin the evening shows, the later segments are sadly true enough -- they re-broadcast a detailed description that Trump gave to Joe & Mika during a town hall in February 2016, where he says our drug prices are sky-high because the government refuses to use its massive collective buying power (through Medicare D) to negotiate down the prices. He said other politicians won't tackle that problem because they're all bought off by the drug companies and their lobbyists, but not me -- I alone can fix, because I'm putting up my own money for my campaign. When I become president, I'm going to negotiate those prices down so fast it'll make ya head spin, and we'll save $300 billion a year.

He has supported single-payer healthcare for the better part of 20 years, and made it known on an hour-long episode of Larry King Live, when he was thinking of running on the Reform Party ticket in 2000. He still does: Michael Wolff recounts, in Fire and Fury, that during the healthcare discussions early in his term, the president asked the other Republicans bluntly, "Why don't we just have Medicare cover everybody?" The other GOP-ers pretended not to have heard such a heresy against Reaganism, which requires maximizing profits for the wealthy even if it impoverishes the majority. Medicare has minimal overhead and administrative costs because it's not profit-maximizing and does not pay its managers obscene salaries.

After surrendering without a fight on single-payer, Trump has wimped out even further by not even delivering on the promise of negotiating down drug prices. As a cosplay president, he acts as though his only role is to be an "ideas guy" who tosses out these heterodox policies -- but if they get shot down by the dinosaur GOP, well, hey, I tried. Maybe he'll bring up the ideas again and again -- but he will never wield power to force the GOP to carry out his orders, which come straight from the American people.

Indeed, as an utter novice in the government, he has no political capital other than the ability to mobilize the collective action of his supporters. But after more than a year of surrendering to the moribund Reaganite Establishment, he has allowed that support base to die off rather than cultivate it. Sure, he's still got the Tea Party and other partisan GOP people -- but just ask McCain and Romney how far that gets you in nationwide elections.

Using the government's buying power to negotiate down drug prices would have been the perfect chance to corral some of his alienated non-partisan supporters back into the fold -- especially during mid-term season when healthcare costs are such a major concern for voters of both parties. Nothing like a little unorthodox policy-stealing to leave the Dems with nothing left to run on other than "It's Mueller time!"

Mouth-breathing GOP partisans will support him no matter what he does, so it makes even less sense to cater to them. "What's that? -- Trump is transitioning us toward single-payer healthcare? Now that's my president! Looks like Barack Hussein Obama is just jealous that a Republican is going to give us Medicare for all! In your face, liberals!" Of course, if Trump pushes for the exact opposite policy, they'll hoot it up over that too. "No president of ours, especially not Trump, is going to lead us into the single-payer grave! Looks like Barrack Hussein Obama is just jealous that a Republican is going to thwart his backdoor plan for single-payer AKA Obamacare. Suck it, liberals!"

With the partisan mouth-breathers locked in no matter if he supports one policy or its polar opposite, he must cater to those who are issue-based voters, and particularly those who swung the election to him in a way that McCain and Romney could not manage. Not abortion issue voters, or gun issue voters -- but Medicare-for-all issue voters, terminate NAFTA issue voters, non-interventionist issue voters.

Instead he has wasted every opportunity to maintain and grow whatever goodwill he initially enjoyed from the other side, who were Independent Obama voters rather than partisan liberal Democrats. His approval rating was actually even-steven around his Inauguration, and I recall a good chunk of non-Trump voters saying at the time, "Hold on, give him a chance, let's wait and see, at least he'll be better than typical Republicans," and so on. After the first couple months as it became clear this would be a Ted Cruz presidency, that goodwill collapsed, and he has been underwater by about 10 points ever since -- sometimes a little higher or lower, depending on the events of the week, but nowhere near his initial breaking-even point.

That's true even for the conservative-leaning Rasmussen poll, where he began in the low-to-mid 50s, before falling to the low-to-mid 40s for most of the time since. During his recent upswing, he's still only in the high 40s, occasionally touching 50-51, but not higher, noticeably below his initial ratings.

How worrying should this be?

According to the American National Election Survey, among Trump's general election voters, 50% had already voted in the primary stage, and of those, 5% voted for Bernie Sanders (only half as many had voted for Hillary in the primary). That means 2.5% of Trump's total voters were Bernie voters -- not just Bernie supporters or sympathizers, but who were populist enough to actually cast a ballot for him, as opposed to other wimpy populists on the Dem side who voted for Hillary in the primary.

Trump's share of the vote in close Rust Belt states was about 48% -- MI, WI, and PA -- meaning that he got just over 1 of those percentage points from Bernie voters (2.5% of 48 points). In fact, Bernie voters probably made up an even larger share of his total in those states, since they were more Bernie-friendly in the primaries than was the nation overall. And he won all three of those states by less than 1 point. The only reason he won the election was by coaxing over these wary Bernie Democrats, not by pandering to the maxed-out Reaganite base.

He used to brag about that fact, which distinguished him from the other Republicans in the primary -- "I'm the only one who can get Democrats to cross over, folks. The Bernie people are really gonna like me on trade, that I can tell you."

Yet the only measure he's taken to appease these voters has been to "announce" tariffs on steel, before carving out exemptions for every major source of steel into our country, minus Japan. Even there, the admin's goal seems to be using that tariff threat in order to get back into the TPP, which is led by Japan. Trump left the TPP negotiations early, but has several times expressed the desire to get back into them, knowing damn well there is no good deal there for Rust Belt industrial workers. In other words, the admin's goal is to break one promise in order to break another promise -- to exempt Japan from steel tariffs in order to entangle the US back into the TPP.

Tariffs were supposed to be actually implemented, in order to force factories back into this country where they would be staffed by American citizens -- not the immigrants who Trump keeps insisting will be the only ones to get those jobs, in order to keep down labor costs for greedy employers. And if tariffs are to be only a threat, the concessions ought to benefit the working class and Bernie voters here -- not the 1% and other corporate pigs who have already sent so many factories and jobs out of this country.

The outcome is unsurprising -- ever-widening trade deficits. He rarely mentions the trade deficit anymore, and only offers vague promises to do better sometime in the future -- despite month and month, and soon year after year, of his administration fucking it up even worse than it was under Obama.

The partisan mouth-breathers may think that these wary Bernie voters who took a chance on Trump will ignore all of these actions taken to either blow them off or actively alienate them. They think a populist Obama voter is going to trap themselves in post-purchase rationalization since they can't take back their vote.

But if that were true, his approval ratings should have at least remained steady, and if anything gone up since Inauguration -- all the more time for rationalization to kick in, and with all the more anti-populist outcomes that ought to have created the cognitive dissonance needed to spur rationalization. We would see more, not fewer, Bernie surrogates in the media championing the admin's outcomes, or at least making excuses for them, or expressing sincere deeply felt hope.

Instead, his numbers with that side have tanked, and none of them are even expressing hope for things to turn around, let alone fervently defending him against his detractors. What is there to defend? -- putting more corporate rape back into the healthcare sector, intervening in more Middle Eastern conflicts, and announcing tariffs that never get implemented? They may not indulge in the phony Mueller probe bullshit, but they still don't support him overall.

And in the next general election, they won't have to -- Bernie supporters will get to vote for Bernie himself in 2020, rather than take a risk on Trump. The uncertainty of that gamble has been cleared up, and whether they blame Trump personally, the GOP writ large, the conservative media, or whatever else on that side of the political world, they have seen their risky bet fail to pay off. OK, no biggie, they'll just go with the more certain populist choice next time.

This is not to mention the easy dunking that anyone will be able to do on Trump about immigration. No wall, no payment from Mexico, illegal population size unchanged, illegal border crossings exactly where they were during Obama's second term, and so on and so forth. You'd think these criticisms will come from anti-immigration activists, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Bernie campaign uses this as another easy chance to dunk on Trump -- "Not that I actually support those policies, but it's yet another example of their broken promises, failure to deliver the goods, and total fragmentation of their party and administration. They can't get anything done to please their own voters -- only their corporate globalist donors."

Between the demoralized anti-immigration voters on the GOP side, and the "back to Bernie" populists on the Dem side, Trump will have little to show on election day 2020 except for the Republican rationalizers. Again, just ask McCain and Romney how much that army's worth in a nationwide battle.

22 comments:

GOP partisans don't get that Trump will be facing Bernie, not Hillary, in 2020, and therefore must be more appealing on the issues compared to Bernie, not compared to Hillary.

If Trump only had to convince people that he would make a more populist president than neoliberalism incarnate, he had a favorable starting position.

If he has to convince people that he'll be more populist than Bernie, his chances plummet. And the next time around, his words will not be hypothetical -- he will have to defend his admin's track record, which is pathetic on populism and isolationism.

So even if Trump somehow manages to eke out a little populism in the less-than-two years before campaign season heats up, that won't be enough to win. Voters will be asking themselves whether Trump or Bernie could deliver more than that meager amount in the next four years.

In other words, Trump not only has to play catch-up -- he has to have a proven track record of being better on the big issues than Bernie would be.

That massive change in so little time, with his admin and party as a whole fragmenting and in tumult every day, is not going to happen -- any more than it was going to happen for Jimmy Carter, who campaigned on radically altering his party's paradigm (away from the New Deal, toward deregulation), yet who had little to show for it when he was up for re-election.

Sure, he had a little to show -- deregulating the transportation sector -- but if the voters wanted deregulation, did they really think Carter would deliver more on that front than Reagan? Reagan was a deregulator on steroids!

Maybe Carter's voters who wanted new things for the dominant party gave him a pat on the back, "what mattered was that you tried," etc. But as for picking the candidate who would shift gears out of the New Deal, that was obviously Reagan, not a second helping of Carter.

In 2020, voters who wanted to shift gears out of Reaganism will choose the relatively more populist, relatively less globalist candidate -- and that will be Bernie, who will out-Trump Trump on those issues. Nobody who was decisive in 2016 will want a second helping of Trump.

At least Carter's supporters were not fascinated by him in a cult of personality way. There's going to be such a massive disconnect when Trump gets booted out from re-election, and most people feel the same way about "the Trump years" as people felt about "the Carter years" -- only now with a leftover personality cult worshiping a guy who most people will want to be forgotten ASAP.

Once the economy goes into recession before November 2020, this disconnect is really going to get ugly. So far, it's only failed or broken promises that are splitting off his take-a-chance voters from his GOP partisan voters. When the shit really hits the fan economically, all bets will be off on either side identifying with the other.

That also goes for any foreign policy disaster that is bound to happen before November 2020.

Some commentators think foreign policy doesn't matter because voters don't rank it highly on issues that matter, when surveyed by pollsters. But that's just the ongoing, day-to-day concerns. Foreign policy events are usually acute disruptions rather than chronic concerns.

And so, they are one of the main factors that go into predictive models like Allan Lichtman's "13 keys" model. A foreign policy triumph, say winning a war, is a big deal. A foreign policy disaster, say losing that war, is also a big deal.

Going back to Carter, he campaigned on less militarism from the militarist party (when the militaristic base of the nation, the South, was Democrat rather than Republican). People were sick of Vietnam, Korea, etc. So Carter said we'll knock that off, if anything try to spread human rights and peace.

He managed to bribe Egypt and Israel into peace with each other (billions of dollars and heavy weaponry every year), after a long period of Israeli-Arab aggression. That did not make the US more peaceful, since we're not close to them, but at least it wasn't using our foreign policy to blow more shit up on the other side of the world, for a change. And it was likely to bring down gas prices by stabilizing the situation over there.

But then our puppet in Iran, the Shah, fell into his own end-of-an-era phase, and got scolded by Carter into adopting a more reformist agenda to stave off revolution. Too little, too late for the disjunctive Shah, who could not stop the Islamic Revolution.

That triggered the Iran hostage crisis, and sent gas prices way the hell back up all over again. That was one of the biggest stains on Carter's record during the 1980 election, and it happened so close to the finish line! Sorry, it happens whenever it happens.

The Trump admin's business as usual in foreign policy is more likely to produce another such scenario in 2020. And it may only explode near the finishing line -- doesn't matter, it blows up whenever it blows up.

Historians will trace his foreign policy downfall to his hiring of Bolton and Pompeo, a totally unforced error that was against the wishes of even the other militarists in the cabinet like Kelly and Mattis. Things are bad when it is "Mad Dog" Mattis who is the most sane voice among the president's advisers.

If that leads toward a foreign policy disaster with Iran, Trump may prove to be more like Jimmy Carter than anyone imagined.

Again, voters in 2020 will not be asking whether Trump can do better in the next four years -- but whether he could do better *than his competitor Bernie* in foreign policy. We know that even mainstream Dems wouldn't have pulled out of the Iran deal, which they invested so much into, let alone escalate things like the Trump admin is doing.

So that'll be an easy decision to make -- less recession-causing corporatism, and less destabilizing chaos in foreign policy. It's going to be Bernie all the way at that point.

Bernie has yet to take over the democratic party apparatus and he probably won't. In 2020 he will be nearing 80 years of age, significantly older than even Trump and Hillary were, tied with Reagan who was suffering from dementia by the end of his second term. There's an unspoken demand for new blood. If there's one candidate who could beat Trump, it would be Gabbard, but she does not have the party standing to be that challenger. Kamala Harris or someone similar is more likely and they will lose by polarizing all non-fringe people against the coaltion of the fringes.

The great thing about the trailblazing phase of the paradigm cycle is that it does not rely on a single individual -- the opposite of the disjunctive stage, where the president says "I alone can alter the paradigm". Trump, Carter, Hoover.

And in a way, he's right -- being alone in his moribund party -- but also wrong -- one person cannot do radical change.

The Reagan revolution was not just one guy, but an entire team of people in the government, think tanks, the media, everywhere. Ditto at the outset of the New Deal -- not just FDR, but a whole new crew of people willing and eager to radically change things. Or the Lincoln crew, or the Jacksonians, or the Jeffersonians.

Trump does not have "the Trumpians" with him, since there are none in politics. Neither did Carter have "the Carterians," since there was no such thing.

But Bernie will have the Bernians -- there's a lot of them already out there. Some in high office like the Senate, who will go along with the re-alignment, others at local offices who will be elevated to Washington, think tanks, activists, policy experts, etc etc etc.

It's that whole wave of new blood that will re-make the political world. "Not me -- us". He's right about that.

He's already the most popular Democrat, driving the conversation and poised to win the nomination among a potentially very divided old-guard field, like Trump did before.

Even assuming, God forbid, he dies of old age before the next election, or early in his term -- the party knows it will have to pick another Bernian, or else get wiped out yet again.

The fate of the nation does not hinge on whether it's Bernie himself or an heir apparent who carries out the shift out of the Reagan paradigm and into the next one. It'll be one Bernian or another.

Reagan didn't control the GOP in 1978 either -- but it was obvious he would, given the '76 primary where he was clearly the trailblazer compared to Ford, as voters wanted something different from the New Deal.

Just two years later -- full control.

Look at how marginalized the Clintons have become in the past two years, compared to El Bernarino. He's still got all his followers, still gets invited onto the corporate media to reach mass audiences, and gives the same vision he did before.

Hell, he's more visible than the Obamas, and most Dems don't hate their guts like they do the Clintons.

Two years, Bernie and the Bernians will be all over the party. You saw how much they nearly tore down the Convention last time, with their constant boo-ing, holding up anti-TPP signs, and so on. That was just the start!

bernie likes money...the globalists corps will pay off bernie...just like they did for obama...and even if bernie won't take a dive, the congress, gop or dem, will take a dive...and the media will cover for them, just like they did when congress thwarted single payer in 2009...remember that?

There are only a handful of politicians aligned with Bernie and they all tend to be outsiders from the party proper. The dem establishment's inclination at the moment is to incorporate some Bernie-style issues to try to placate SWPLs while sticking to social and racial justice to keep minorities and single women happy. At the moment, Kamala Harris is focusing on pot legalization and public healthcare.It has been over 40 years since the populist labor left has really been a thing. Reagan crushed what was left of it. And Reagan himself could draw on many former fans of Goldwater who were well ingrained in his party's establishment.

The unfortunate reality is neither party has the bench to smoothly effect a populist takeover. Bill Clinton spent most of the 90s as a typical post-Reagan president bombing foreign countries and promoting free trade. Obama wasn't that huge of a change from George W. Bush. As you yourself have written the two parties represent different factions of the elite.

A populist reaction to the neo gilded age is inevitable but as your anon commenter points out it won't be easily carried out by the political system as we know it. Pressures will simply continue build...

Trump for all his flaws is clearly just one guy in an entrenched system. If anything, his struggles have revealed the real power structure for millions of Americans.

The trouble with Bernie, as anon points out is he lacks the killer instinct that made Trump president. The "enough of her damn e-mails" comment was basically handing away the primary without a fight. He's always taken money and gifts from the establishment rather than make a stand. He even campaigned more for Hillary than she campaigned for herself after he was robbed of the nomination. If Bernie had the nomination, his weakness would become obvious on the national stage. In office, he would make Trump look like a decisive emperor.

Wrong, 16 Senators have already signed onto Bernie's main issue -- Medicare for all -- plus others who at least support an option to buy into Medicare (Murphy, Brown, etc.). That was supposedly such a radical idea less than 8 years ago that it was excluded from the Obamacare negotiations.

Those Senators are totally mainstream, and already seated, often for more than two terms. So he's already got plenty of party regulars on board -- again, not to mention getting invited onto mainstream media to spread his views, holding large-attendance rallies, and having tons of activists / think tankers / etc. backing him up.

Things don't change until they do, they don't keep going forever. Jacksonians were just going to keep pushing slavery further through the land, and defending it in the South -- until they were dethroned and defeated in a bloody civil war, with their civilian rulers replaced with Northern martial law for decades after, only subsiding with the 1876 election where the South traded its electoral votes for an exit of Union army generals.

No one said the solution to today's neo-Gilded Age will be entirely electoral, but that will obviously be a big part of any major shift.

Being wealthy or liking money doesn't matter either, as the New Deal coalition was led by an old-money quasi-aristocrat, FDR, along with the New York banks. We work with whoever will work with us.

People born since the mid-70's have scarcely benefited from a guilded age. Politically and electorally, it makes no sense to alienate millions of youngish voters who are gaining in importance as they age. Boomers, the biggest generation in Western history when they gained dominance of the system in the 1990's, have had their "values" catered to for 40 years. The still dominant contingent of Boomer elites and the Boomer base to which they appeal may rather blow their head off than be told that society needs to be reoriented in the direction of the community and restraint rather than individualistic excess. But that just means further starvation of people hungry for change, whose appetite will eventually be sated by a group of reformers who aren't idiots living in the past.

Bernie is consistently the most popular Senator, and the most popular Democrat. Harris poses no danger, especially since she's just started her first term and has no record. Her only message is "I'm a woman of color from the Pacific" -- yeah, and so is Tulsi. No one cares.

The opposition must figure out who is actually a threat from the other side if they want to stave that off -- not just figure out who makes for the best punchlines.

But that's really a big piece of Bernie's path to a revolutionary shake-up -- the dinosaur dumbasses in the GOP will be prepping to deal with Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and other LIEBRULS.

Maybe, like the Dem Establishment did last time for Trump, they will even go out of their way to prop up Bernie against the other Dems, moronically and suicidally thinking that the "crazy" "extremist" will be the most easily defeated in a general nationwide election. Wrong, bitch! Our country wants radical change, right now, not a second helping of the poisonous status quo.

If they're going to use these pointless sanctions against NK or Iran, it should be as a pretext to do populist nationalism under a neocon-friendly framing.

I.e., since China is sending things made with American parts to NK and Iran in violation of our sanctions on them, we will withdraw our supplies of those parts to the Chinese manufacturers. That will kill off the Chinese manufacturer and, why not slam a tariff on China as well for violating the sanctions, making those factories come back here. It should be American parts supplied to American manufacturers.

But no, why would Trump ever think he got elected to implement populism and America only-ism? Make Chinese telecom cartels great again!

And even if you're going to cuck that hard for job-killing Chinese manufacturing cartels, STFU about it on Twitter -- just do it behind the scenes, where no Overton windows will get shifted in the corporate globalist direction, and where your voters won't hear that you're more concerned with restoring China's manufacturing than America's.

We need an Infowars-style hijacking of live on-air Fox & Friends broadcasts, where some random 20 year-old moves into frame, whips out Steve Bannon's whiteboard of Trumpian priorities, and holds it up long enough for it to get further coverage, screenshotted on Twitter, etc.

check your math...16 senators is not 50 senators...and even if they do pass something called 'medicare for all' i guarantee it will be a scam and a giveaway to the big corporations...remember a certain Dem candidate who beat clinton in 2008 by calling for a public option? Well, we got something entirely different...

here is the problem--> congress gets paid big money to NOT pass populist legislation...they get paid via access to IPOs, insider stock tips, sweetheart contract deals and book deals and such...how do you think it is that these congressmen and getting filthy rich --millions and millions on public servant salaries...have you checked their net worth? I have....they get paid this way to do the bidding of the big corporations...and universal healthcare is not what the corporate masters want

Wrong again, we got Medicare, and the other rich countries got full single-payer, during the New Deal era even though the politicians were everything you just said -- bought off, controlled by powerful sectors of society, rich, elite, etc.

The elites will surrender on single-payer -- or anything else -- when they calculate that it is more in their interest to do so than to obstruct it. And with the way things are shaping up for 2020, that will be during Bernie's 1st term.

You're a very poor observer if you think we're still in the 2008 climate. We just voted for a total novice for PRESIDENT because he promised to up-end the status quo of the past 40 years. Obama promised nothing of the sort, just taking off more of the edges from Reaganism.

Four years after the disjunctive Trump admin, we will want even more radical change to make up for lost time -- not to mention we will be in recession by Nov 2020.

The big banks are A-OK with single-payer, or else their puppets like Corey Booker would not have been allowed to publicly sign onto the bill merely one year after the Establishment sunk Bernie's candidacy.

After Trump's win, they saw which way the wind's blowing. They recognize they have to fight populism with populism if they ever want control again. Name one other major legislative agenda item that the Dems put out last year -- it was clear they wanted to seed the idea that they're going to be the party who gives us Medicare for all, instead of HMOs raping the American people to death forever and ever. Sucks to the HMOs and the pharma cartels -- who are GOP puppet masters -- not to the big banks, who are Dem puppet masters.

T.V. isn't a dead medium but basically only old people use it for news or politics these days. The Median age of a fox viewer is 68! with I suspect a few younger Trump supporters watch Tucker Carlson its still old.

C.N.N when last checked had a median age of 59 but as of this years lost 1/3 of its viewers!

Its all AARP territory out there.

Now there is still too much Facebook and its liable to block Bernie Bros anyway but these days hundreds of other sources abound and people are selecting them

The era of mass media is fading and not moment too soon.

As far as Medicare for all, people are fine with it until they find out how much it would cost and how much worse a lot of peoples services will become

Such systems can provide basic coverage for everyone in some cases but they are by no means good and they come at a cost of the Feds gobbling up a bigger and bigger percentage of the GDP

Historically the US has been limited to 20% GDP max in federal tax revenue (its a function of the Laffer curve colloquially known as Hauser's Law) and with wage arbitrage there may simply not be enough revenue out there to get.

The issue of immigration also plays in, in essence Medicare for All is mostly a transfer from Middle and Upper class Conservative Whites to Blacks, Latinos , Leftists and other groups who are their political enemies

Considering the absolute fury over the affordable care act an even more massive tax increase might not be very easy to cram down.

Its also going to require immense message discipline, the minute the Bernie Bros open their yaps about gun control, immigration, Cultural Marxism and all the other issues they love its going to spoil the message

Because of Leftist overreach and mass immigration, even the mostly fake comity of the post war era is fading fast

we don't have the level of political violence of the 60's and 70's yet but may well and we've seen inklings of it including two Leftist mass murder attacks (one in Vegas at the country music festival and another attack House Republicans) and a bit of street violence.

Its kept in check by Right Wing restraint, an introverted culture and policing.

Also any policy choices that made sense in the 1930's ought to be reconsidered

The US was around 90% White , had undergone an immigration freeze to force assimilation and was an industrial power in a crisis. Also information was tightly controlled by the elite with local radio, newspapers and that's about it

We live in a society that is essence nothing like that with porous borders, an Internet, post industrial economy and racial divisions that are vastly wider than before.

Ethnic and cultural difference created enough problems but everyone was European?

These days its not like that and comity hasn't been this low since the 19th century

Single-payer is dramatically cheaper, with better outcomes, because the overhead is low (2% vs. 20%, since no corporate managers being overfed), and because the collective bargaining power of the govt program can crush prices charged by providers (hospitals and pharma alike).

We spend twice as much of our GDP compared to single-payer countries -- 16% last I checked. That's insane, and unsustainable. Plus the jobs suck in that sector.

If single-payer were more expensive, then the drug cartels, the hospital cartels, and the insurance cartels would all have rammed through single-payer decades ago -- more money for them, right?

Back on planet Earth, they have fought tooth and nail to prevent single-payer -- not because it's more expensive, but obviously because it's cheaper.

People aren't stupid, have figured this out long ago, and have been supporting Medicare for all for decades.

Cuckservatives have abandoned trying to scare people with stats because all the numbers show how superior single-payer is. So now it's just a hysterical screaming campaign, impotently trying to prevent the populist backlash.

But as we know, retarded conservatives howling at the moon aren't going to stop us from getting what's best for the people -- including brainwashed conservatives at the grassroots level. They'll get better healthcare and lower costs, whether they like it or not.

Even if you are a brainwashed conservative on healthcare, on a pragmatic level you must take a different issue to fear-monger against than single-payer -- healthcare is the one issue where absolutely no one trusts Republicans or conservatives to give us a better system than Democrats or Socialists or progressives.

It is utter suicide for conservatives to push their retarded economic programs, after having been so thoroughly discredited by reality, and rejected by even hardcore GOP primary voters (Trump over the cucks). Even if you don't believe in single-payer, you must STFU about it -- it's going to happen, and railing against it will only get you thrown out further into the wilderness.

The conservatives' job, now that their 40-year reign is winding down, is to put as much of a conservative and patriotic spin on the upcoming gear-shift into populism led by Bernie Democrats.

E.g., we'll agree to single-payer on the condition that only American citizens are covered, rather than illegals -- just like how Canada only covers Canadians.

And no that's not the same as "the conservative case for polyamory" or whatever in the social-cultural realm. "The conservative case for populism" should have been made a long time ago -- it's too late for that to give them the leading role, but at least they can play a secondary role, shaping the Bernie Democrats' economic program in as much of a socially and culturally conservative way as possible.

E.g., given how little we want to spend on healthcare -- as opposed to how much we spend now -- we ought to focus more on the important basics, not frivolous indulgences. So, cleaning up the water supply, shifting food stamps away from carbs and toward animal products, dental work, and other preventative stuff -- not hormone blockers for the 10 year-old children of attention-whoring SJW parents.

Every dollar spent on frivolous SJW crap is one less dollar spent on real things for poor people, black people, vulnerable newborns, etc.

Damning the GOP effort against frivolous SJW spending is the fact that conservatives are all-in on subsidizing the most degenerate garbage for the most worthless generation ever, sometimes referred to as the Boomers.

Medicare should not in any case be paying for whatever vanity drugs the Boomers are loading up on in their pathetic last-ditch effort to make it past 70, after a lifetime of bodily abuse (drugs, unprotected promiscuity, pasta salad for every meal during the 1980s, jogging instead of sprinting, etc.).

Of course it's going to be the Bernie Democrats who will be more biased against the Boomers, drawing on "younger" generations (anyone post-Boomer).

When the public debate reaches the stage of Boomer conservative Republicans demanding that the govt maintain Medicare for olds so they can keep getting free boner pills, while just as strongly demanding that the govt never extend Medicare to babies, adolescents, or pre-elderly adults for basic things like check-ups, dental work, and accidents requiring surgery -- there will not only be a tipping point in hypocrisy, but the backlash may be so great that we decide to just pull the plug on the Boomers outright.

Never has such a parasitic generation fought to prevent the starving from getting fed.

S & Howe frequently talked about how the "Lost Generation" buggered off instead of getting in the way of The New Deal and Great Society....They may have voted against FDR, but at least they had the decency to not sponge off a society which they may never have loved or got along with very well, but at least they had enough humility to not take far beyond what they had given.

The taking and giving ratio....As you point out how do you figure that a generation which gave so little expects to get so much....For what, exactly? Raising children who usually taught themselves to NOT do whatever the younger adults in the home and in the neighborhood were doing? For that matter, the very Boomers who presided over a child abuse crisis often take credit for giving their kids "values". Sure, whatever assuages your feelings about being in the driver's seat as we were steered off a cliff.